However, something quite different happened when the Word took flesh, and Athanasius is emphatic that we should not think “that, as in former times the Word was used to come into each of the Saints, so now He sojourned in a man.”109 Far from merely sojourning in a body, the Word assumed the flesh entirely in order to “make it Word.” And then (at last!) Athanasius explains that he does this by the Spirit: “we, apart from the Spirit, are strange and distant from God, and by the participation of the Spirit we are knit into the Godhead.”
